Remember those things called blogs? The things that enabled people to publish their thoughts and share their passions , enthusiasms and ideas with the world?

It’s moving on apace, it seems that every cat and his dog is doing the tweet thing lately, and if it aint raw tweets then its tweets with flickr links or blip links or qiks or 12second or …(insert any other aspect of the broadcast your personality type of media we have today).

I’m undecided if its a symptom of some kind of fucked up state of I want to be a celebrity lemme into here or just some kind of natural evolution of phones and texts and communication generally. Celebs like Stephen Fry are tweeting, people like John Cleese are seesmicing, and the interesting thing about these guys is that yup, they are middle aged men. Not some hip 20 or 30 something techno nerds, but mainstream mass media global figures. Ok, so Stephen Fry might not be the real Stephen Fry (though he says he is) but it’s indicative of a certain something and an interesting recognition from them at least that this thing we all take for granted and love is on the verge of mass market take up.

Tweeting is so addictive

What struck me as I drove along in my car is that I’ve become one of these people who tweets almost incessantly, one of the few places I don’t is in my car or in my sleep, and of course when I’m working very hard (hi guv’nor) .

I don’t yet do the whole qik thing or twitpic thing cos, I haven’t gotten that granular yet and I don’t yet have a phone that is really suitable for it (god help me if I ever do) but lots of people do. I tweet when I’m up I tweet when I’m drunk, I tweet on the train, over my morning coffee, my walk to work, my walk home and sometimes when I’m in bed unable to sleep.

Intertwexting intertwactions

I’m not alone either, take girlonetrack an interesting person who defines herself as a sex blogger, she sometimes qiks aspects of her life as it happens. If you happen to follow her twitter stream you’ll get insights into her and who she is, her hopes, her humours, her fears, the types of events she hangs at, who she hangs with etc etc blah.

Now, in a world of shit TV, stuff like this can be interesting, and the beauty of it is that one day, you might just have 1000’s of ‘channels’ to choose from. This stuff really is going to continue to shake the whole entertainment/communications industry is ways we just haven’t really thought right through yet.

Tweknology has driven it

It’s like the bar has been raised and like aspects before it, the technology has enabled it.

In the pre web 2 world, I would be able to read a blog and get personal or professional insights that way. A person could either switch me on or switch me off, dependant upon how crap or how brilliant their posts were. Following a lot of people this way via feeds and stuff was limited in that, I could only follow so many people and read so many posts at any given time. Today though it’s all changed.

The whole micro blogging climate of twitter allows me to get the zing on far more many people. I can laugh or pity with the ridiculousness of some peoples self absorbed narcissism I can read and follow the highs and lows of start ups I can spot new ideas and trends in the market, moods and perceptions of opinion formers in the space. I can banter with colleagues, exchange ideas with respected peers offer people solace, share my highs, my lows, my exasperations all in one simple place, it’s healthy , it’s productive, it’s communicative. It enables me to interact with others in ways that might otherwise of been extremely difficult. People can either back @ me or just ignore me, it doesn’t really matter. I can communicate directly with people who might just otherwise filter me out, it doesn’t matter if they ignore me, or engage me (although the engagement part is preferable) the point of it all is that I can on some level communicate an idea a thought or a process – heck this very post will also ping my twitter stream too. My facebook page has a twitter embed which means that my tweets are posted to my facebook status updates. My offline friends have even asked me if I’m ok, having seen multiple facebook status updates from me in short timeframes of varying perspectives! This very blog has a further tie in with twitter too, evident in my sidebar to the right.

I know others who use it for a means of talking with others in various areas. They tweet their locations, or their plans, they have tweet ups and go on the twiss its used to network and draw strands together, make new friendships.

Yup, no shit I love twitter. Twitter rocks.

Twoogle likes it too

None of this has been lost on those folks at Google either, and if you ever wanted an insight into the freshness aspect of the algo, just go look at a serp or two for various tweeples names; look at the speed in which the tweets are being referenced, it’s awesomely quick.

Twammers love it too

The myriad of platforms that exist that use the twitter API are a boom time for content creationists too. Some clever mother fudders have seen the potentials and have come up with ways of creating multiple twit accounts and as a result are parasiting on the thing to get those old trusty back links to their spam and crap. A shame of course, but a takeaway of this is that it shows that if used legitimately, it does of course offer all manner of opportunities for brand or product development, as whilst links are often tinyurlised in peoples tweets and slapped up with nofollows, the obverse is true in apps seeking to re-orientate the content.

As for the Twuture

Who really knows how this thing will all evolve, it wouldn’t susrpise me if one day, some people start qiking from their cars via specially adapted cams stuck to their dashboards with an on switch on their steering wheels directly streaming via their satnav hookup, baseball caps that hook direct to their 12second streams pinging back to their tweet streams, a day when we can all just tap into each others lives.